Cars That Drive Themselves Pass the 1000 Mile Mark

Source: NY Times

Not a new story per se, but interesting in that Google has been testing autonomous cars in traffic, and they've gone 1000+ miles without human intervention (and 140,000 miles with only occasional intervention). The NY Times story suggests that autonomous vehicles have the potential to transform society as dramatically as the Internet. It would certainly fix the texting while driving issue once and for all. The  programming is sophisticated enough at this point to have styles of driving ranging from cautious to aggressive. It's fascinating that Google is obviously putting non-trivial resources into this research... makes you wonder what else they are working on.

UPDATE: Deepak Singh has an interesting post on this kind of speculative research.